


The Abyss

by EbonyKnight



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, References to Depression, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2018-09-19 11:49:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9438842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EbonyKnight/pseuds/EbonyKnight
Summary: Greg has had a few weeks from Hell. Sherlock is there to support him. Eventually. Spoilers for The Final Problem.Please note a potential trigger warning for issues relating to mental health.Second chapter added many months after the first, largely because I'm a sucker for a happy ending.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock.
> 
> So. I'm not entirely certain what happened here. I was watching The Lying Detective and thought Rupert Graves looked really, really tired and found myself wondering about it. Then this happened. 
> 
> I've read a lot of fic where Greg is supportive of Sherlock, seeing him through hard times and addiction and withdrawal. Having decided to experiment with angst, I thought I'd flip the roles around, too. 
> 
> I've not stated that Greg is suffering from mental ill health, but I think that comes across anyway. Everyone with mental illness will experience it differently, but I have drawn on my own experience here. 
> 
> It's not beta'd, or even really edited and is largely stream of consciousness. 
> 
> I'd love to hear what you think. I've very rarely written angst, even in days gone by writing Drarry fic, so feedback would be gratefully received.

It was cold and wet when Greg finally got home at twenty to ten, but he was so fatigued that he barely noticed it. He got out of the car slowly, head aching abominably with the movement, and walked down the street towards his flat, doing nothing to shield his face from the rain falling like bullets of ice. It had been one thing after another for months, a never ending procession of stress, fear, pain, and loss. Just when he'd thought it could get no worse and Mary had taken a bullet for Sherlock, sending the younger man completely off the rails, his beloved sister had been struck down by a brain aneurysm, and Greg had been lost to grief. By the time the situation with the secret Holmes sibling had played out, he'd been holding onto his sanity by a thread. Adrenaline and bravado had propelled him through that night, but only just. Two weeks had passed since then, two weeks during which he had worked, and mourned, and drank, and heard narry a peep from Sherlock or Mycroft. Not a response to a message, or an appearance at a crime scene, or a post-work kidnapping.

As it was, Sherlock chose the worst possible moment to break the pattern; Greg approached his building and caught sight of the world’s only consulting detective leaning casually against the wall beside the main door and had to do a double take, half convinced that he was seeing things. It was, however, no hallucination, and Greg felt a surge of molten hot anger; there the bastard was, looking for all the world like nothing remarkable had happened in the last few weeks, like he hadn't disappeared without a word, like nothing had changed. “Fuck off, Sherlock,” he snarled. 

Something that might have been hurt flittered across Sherlock’s face, but Greg was well past caring. “Greg—”

“--Oh, it’s _Greg_ again now, is it? Why do you only ever fucking use my name when you fucking want something?”

The younger man pushed himself off the wall, moving into the light cast by the streetlamp; he was wearing the dark blue shirt he knew Greg had a soft spot for and suddenly things fell into place: Greg knew _exactly_ what Sherlock wanted. “No,” he said, shaking his head emphatically despite the violent throb, “I’ve had enough of being used by you, so you can just fuck right off!” he snapped, digging his keys out of his coat pocket. 

“Greg, what’s—” Sherlock started, moving to block Greg’s path to the building’s front door. 

“—What’s wrong, Sherlock? Is that what you were going to ask? It’s you, you’re what’s wrong! You just turn up here after weeks of ignoring me and expect me to smile and say yes and invite you in like I always have. Well, guess what? Not this fucking time!”

“I—”

“—You what? You’re bored, are you? John busy with Rosie, maybe, and you’ve got nothing interesting on? So what? You thought 'oh I know where there’s a sad old bastard who always puts out whenever I fancy a shag, I’ll go and bother him; never mind that I’ve not acknowledged his existence for weeks, or that he’s grieving for his sister, because he always does what I want!'” 

Greg shoved past Sherlock and opened the door into the building, but the other man slipped through before he was able to close it behind himself.

“I’m sorry, Greg,” Sherlock apologised, reaching out to touch his shoulder with uncharacteristic uncertainty. 

A long moment passed during which Greg stared at Sherlock, mind whirling with thoughts, one painful, stabbing thought after the other, until whatever control of his emotions he'd woken up with that morning evaporated, and he snapped. Tears welled unstoppably, and no amount of biting his lips or jamming the heels of his hands into his eyes would stop them. “Did you know?” he demanded brokenly, glaring at Sherlock through a haze of tears. “Did you know that Maggie died?”

Sherlock shook his head and opened his mouth to speak, but Greg was past the point of wanting to hear from him. “No, because you don’t care, do you? John Watson, the man who abandoned you, who beat the shit out of you, you care about him; Irene Addler, the woman who drugged you and used you, you care about her. But me? Me, who’s always been here, no matter what you’ve done or needed?” he implored. A tense silence stretched between them, and Greg felt the fight leave him. “Just leave me the fuck alone, Sherlock.”

He shrugged Sherlock’s hand off his shoulder and started up the stairs up to his floor, the world closing in around him until he was barely cognizant of his movements. 

The flat was cold, for it had been days since he'd been home, but Greg didn't care enough to turn the heating on. He crossed the living room in the dark, almost tripping over a discarded shoe, and collapsed onto the sofa, sitting in his wet coat, tremors wracking his body from the cold and emotional distress. Rain trickled from his hair down the back of his neck in slow rivulets, but the accumulated pain and stress of the last month subsumed everything and he didn't notice it. He was so lost in his head, the pain so overwhelming, that he didn't hear his lock being picked, nor the door opening and closing, and nor did he notice Sherlock turning the light or heating on. It was not until the other man crouched in front of him and took hold of his hands, rubbing them between his own, that Greg became aware of anything outside of his own mind. 

“When did you last eat?” 

Greg tried to think but his brain refused to cooperate. He couldn't understand why, but he was trapped in an endless cycle of his worst memories; being told that Maggie was in hospital and not expected to live; realising that Laura was cheating on him _again_ ; receiving Mycroft’s message informing him that Sherlock had committed suicide. He tried and tried to think about something else, to push the memories aside, to focus on what Sherlock was saying, but to no avail. 

“Greg, can you hear me? Greg!” 

“There’s too much,” Greg heard himself replying, dropping his head into his hands and digging his fingernails into his scalp until the skin broke. He distantly felt Sherlock moving around him, removing his coat and shoes, covering him with a blanket and stroking his hair, but it took a long time before the fog cleared enough for any of it to make sense.

When he came around, he found that he was laid on the sofa under a blanket with his head pillowed on Sherlock’s thigh as the other man carded long fingers through his hair. He sat up slowly, putting some distance between them, mortification spreading through his body like wildfire. 

“Have you seen a doctor recently?” Sherlock asked calmly, leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees and fingers steepled beneath his chin. 

“No,” Greg replied, voice rough. “I just need some sleep and I’ll be fine.”

Sherlock pinned Greg with an implacable stare. “That was significant mental distress: no amount of sleep will fix that.”

“I’m not mad, Sherlock,” Greg snapped, stung. 

“I didn't say that you are.”

“What do you even want? Why did you come here tonight? You shut me out after you got John back, haven’t even replied to a single text, and then you just—”

“—I checked myself into rehab two weeks ago. Mycroft found a facility in Switzerland, and we left immediately. No contact with the outside world was allowed. What happened with Eurus was…well, it brought a lot back and I couldn't deal with it. Mycroft approached me about it the day after the events at Sherrinford and I agreed to go on the condition that he went with me to deal with his drinking and guilt.”

Still struggling to keep his mind on track, Greg slowly parsed out what Sherlock had said. Thinking felt like wading through treacle, but he eventually put the pieces together. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded. “After Mary’s death you barely spoke to me, wouldn’t even see me. I could see you falling apart, and then Maggie… and …” 

“You needed me and I wasn’t there,” Sherlock said, shuffling along the sofa until their knees were touching. "I was so caught up in what was happening with Mary, and then the drugs and Culverton Smith that I didn't see what was happening with you. That is unacceptable; I'm sorry.”

Greg lost the battle then, the tide of emotion crashing into him with such force that it was physically painful. Weeks of thinking that Sherlock didn't want him, of thinking that he had failed the other man, came to a head and he buried his face in Sherlock’s neck. Sobs wracked his body, the pain of loss and abandonment refusing the stay behind his mental barriers any longer. Sherlock held him close, stroking his back and his hair and breathing deliberately deeply until Greg’s breathing fell into sync. “I came tonight to explain, to apologise. When Eurus threatened Molly, I told her that I love her. It was the only way to entice her to say it back to me, which Eurus intimated was necessary to prevent her from detonating explosives in Molly’s flat. The thought of losing Molly made me realise that I _do_ love her, but not how she wants me to. I also realised that it is because that's how I love _you_ , and have done for several years. I’ve not wanted to acknowledge those feelings, went out of my way to ignore them, but I can’t do that anymore.”

The words were heard, but their meaning failed to register for the longest time. Eventually, he sat up, putting some distance between them, and tried desperately to pull his scattered thoughts together. Unable to look Sherlock in the eye, Greg dropped his gaze but caught sight of a dark, wet stain on the shoulder of the other man’s shirt, and shame crashed into him at the visible evidence of how he had fallen apart. 

“I…do you mean that?” 

Sherlock picked up Greg’s right hand, stroking the back of it with his thumb. “I repressed an awful lot in childhood, and ran away from even more as an adult. I’m working on it, but I want to do it with you. I know you think I used you for sex, and I’m sorry for that. If I did, it was because you’re one of the few I’ve ever wanted and trusted enough in that way.”

Looking down at their joined hands, Greg tried to think it through, but his own mind was refusing the play ball. 

“You need to sleep,” Sherlock said decisively, standing up and pulling Greg up with him. “Tomorrow you’re going to see a doctor, and then we’ll talk about this again.”

Knowing that Sherlock was right, Greg acquiesced and allowed the younger man to lead him to the bedroom. They worked together to get Greg out of his wet clothes and he was soon under the duvet with Sherlock curled behind him, one arm slung protectively across his waist. The pain and stress and fatigue had taken their toll, and darkness moved in inexorably, pulling him into the abyss.


	2. Light on the other side

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was written several months after the first. I'm a sucker for a happy ending, and didn't feel comfortable leaving them in limbo like that. They still have a way to go, of course, but they're getting there. 
> 
> Again, there are more of my impressions about treatment of mental illness in here. All very personal, and hopefully no offence caused.
> 
> Chapter beta'd by the fabulous RomanyWalker.

_On a scale of one to ten, rate your mood over the last seven days._ Greg read the question and fought back a sigh. Over the last two months, he’d answered that question – in various guises – more times than he could count, and it still caused a hot spike of annoyance. As far as he was concerned, it was pointless at best and fucking stupid at worst. How on earth was he meant to know what a ‘ten’ even was? How did they know that his ‘four’ wasn’t the same as the next bloke’s ‘six’? What was the point in sitting there agonising over whether he was a ‘four’ or a ‘five’ when the therapist _knew_ that he’d been diagnosed with depression and that it was therefore _highly_ unlikely that he would swan in wearing a grin and the ‘nine’ circled in sparkly purple gel ink? Questions about how many times in the last seven days he’d tried to shave with his toothbrush, or how often his body had refused to do what his brain commanded it to would be a far more accurate gauge of his mental health, but so far his suggestions had been ignored. 

According to Donna, his therapist, however, the fact that he was feeling annoyance was ‘progress’. It didn’t make any sense to him, but nothing really had recently, so he let it slide and turned his attention back to the questionnaire. He’d just passed the midway point in the seemingly endless list of questions all asking the same bloody thing when the young woman with lopsidedly tattooed-on eyebrows sitting opposite cleared her throat pointedly. Looking up, he found both her and the baby perched on her left knee watching him with curiosity. “Sorry, but have you got Parkinson’s?” she asked, with an accusatory glance at his foot. Greg followed her line of sight and found that his right foot was bouncing somewhat erratically where it was suspended over his left leg. “It’s just that my granddad’s got it and his legs used to shake like that, but we found this alternative pill thing with coconut oil, and it’s basically stopped it. I can tell you website I got it from if you want.”

For the sake of his sanity, Greg ignored the fact someone had caught sight of him and believed him old enough to have Parkinson’s and stilled his leg, pasting on a smile. “Nope, I’m just hacked off; I doubt coconut oil’ll help with that. Thanks, though.”

“Oh,” said the woman, apparently disappointed at not being able to offer him a magic cure for a disease that he didn’t have. The baby fussed and she turned her attention to mothering it, leaving Greg to return to his questionnaire, wondering why the hell people in doctors’ waiting rooms felt the need to strike up conversations in the first place.

By the time Donna appeared at the mouth of the corridor to summon him, the young woman had moved on to bothering an elderly man about his cough and the receptionists were engrossed in a conversation about the virtues of Tom Hardy to the detriment of the phones, which were ringing persistently in the background. Greg folded his completed questionnaire and stood, stepping around a toddler playing with blocks in the middle of the floor to get to the corridor leading to the consulting rooms.

“Afternoon, Greg,” Donna smiled warmly. She was all of five feet tall but usually had enough energy for seven people, and he found himself smiling back, despite his bad mood. “We’re in room seven today.” Room seven, it transpired, was exactly the same as room five, their usual room, but it happened to be at the arse end of the corridor. “The practice manager absolutely _insisted_ that he needed our room for his new locum,” she grumbled as they entered the nineties-esque peach painted room.

“No problem,” Greg replied, taking the more comfortable-looking of the two patients’ chairs and glancing out of the rain spattered window. “We’ve got a better view of the car park, anyway.”

“Oh, you mean the pond? I thought I was going to need a dinghy to get from my car to the door,” Donna said, amused, scratching her nose absently with brightly painted nails. She settled into the second patient's chair so they were seated like they were about to have a chat in a pub and not a therapy session at his doctors’ practice. Such tactics, intended to make her more approachable and him more at ease, were front and centre of ‘Interviewing For Dummies’, and being so blatantly manipulated by something he used on a daily basis had been another thing to be angry about initially; he had, however, let that slide when she’d turned out to be damned good at her job and had actually managed to get him through their first session without him giving into the urge to leg it. Settling her skirt neatly over her knees, Donna pinned Greg with an assessing look. “So, how did your cousin’s birthday party go? Any problems with that dragon of an aunt you told me about?”

***

The rain had let up slightly when Greg left the health centre forty five minutes later, but it was still bitingly cold. He pulled his coat tightly around himself and jammed his hands into the too-small pockets, trying to protect them from the worst of the chill.

As was always the case when the weather took a nasty turn, the denizens of London turned to the Tube in their droves; he soon found himself wedged against the door of a train speeding through subterranean London, breathing air that hadn’t been fresh since nineteen thirty nine, as the woman next to him tried her best to convince her son not to pick his nose in public. Without the driving need to get out of the inclement weather serving as a distraction, Greg’s mind wandered back over the last couple of months, as it generally did after a session with Donna pulled everything to the fore, hoping in vain that it would start to make sense. It didn’t, but each time there was a difference; something that was marginally less painful to contemplate, something that inspired less anger than previously, something that caused the shame at the way he’d totally lost control of his own fucking mind to burn less hotly.

It had, of course, been a long, difficult road to get to this point, but he was finally starting to feel more himself and in control. That wasn’t to say that there weren’t still days when he wished he hadn’t woken up at all, but they were fewer and farther between. The morning after Sherlock’s return from rehab, blanketed by humiliation and shame, Greg had fought the suggestion that he see his GP tooth and nail, but with the perspective given by the last few months, he was grateful that the other man was constitutionally incapable of taking ‘no’ for an answer. The diagnosis of depression and prescription for an antidepressant had hit him like a smack in the face, but he’d accepted the medication and referral to the first line mental health service because he had _known_ that he couldn’t carry on as he had been. He also knew that whilst his mood and state of mind had improved since his first session with Donna - and he was doing his damnedest not to think about how many strings had been pulled and people manipulated by the Holmes brothers to get him seen on the NHS _that_ quickly - there was still a long way to go to get back to ‘normal’.

On the advice of his GP, he’d taken a couple of weeks’ sick leave to give the medication time to kick in and his body a chance to begin recovering. Willpower alone had kept him at work until then, but had anyone asked him what he’d actually been doing he wouldn’t have had a clue; the days had blurred together and the memories were so indistinct that he couldn’t have differentiated between one case and another by the time the situation with Sherlock had come to a head.

The train came to a halt and the rush of people alighting was swapped for a swarm of people embarking, and Greg found himself pushed further down the car, stuck between a man in a suit that must have cost at least his month’s salary and a woman with bright blue hair. He considered trying to find a spot with a little more space for the last five stops, but a sharp vibration against his leg diverted his attention, and he worked his phone out of his pocket, doing his level best not to elbow anyone in the ribs.

 **Sherlock Holmes:** The Beekeeper in half an hour. Get me a Worm Catcher if you arrive first.

Greg tapped out a quick ‘See you there’ with a small smile, determinedly not questioning how Sherlock knew that he was free or even in remotely the right bit of London to get to the pub that quickly. Their relationship had come on leaps and bounds since the night the younger man had turned up and refused to leave, and that they now had a ‘regular’ pub and spent time together that neither a quickie nor case were central to pleased Greg. In the years since his divorce, they had shared a spotted history of falling into bed together when things got rough. Not that Sherlock hadn’t tried his luck - many, many times - when Greg had been married, of course, but nothing had happened until his relationship with Laura was well and truly over. Even then, their liaisons were almost always instigated by Sherlock when he’d felt the need for company or had an itch to scratch, and Greg had an absolutely infuriating inability to tell him ‘no’, which had invariably left him feeling used and angry when the other man disappeared as soon as he’d sated his needs.

He hadn’t realised quite how emotionally involved he had become until he’d had to watch, utterly helpless, as Sherlock had gone flying off the rails in the wake of Mary’s death. It was then that the realisation that he’d fallen for the other man had hit home, and he hadn’t had a fucking clue how to deal with it, so had opted for not doing so. Of course, that didn’t mean that being in love with Sherlock Holmes was any easier to handle now, because it wasn’t. The bastard still left junior - and occasionally very senior - officers in tears, still stole evidence, and still broke into his flat and tried to store said stolen evidence in his fridge, but there was one massive difference between then and now: Sherlock loved him back. He’d even said so, the memory of which had come as such a surprise once Greg’s head had settled enough to process everything Sherlock had said that night that he’d had to ask whether he’d imagined it. The other man’s glare had been glacial, but the confirmation that he had indeed said and _meant_ it had been emphatic, and Greg had smiled properly for the first time in weeks.

The train started to slow and Greg listened out for the overhead announcement, surprised to hear that his stop was next. He elbowed his way through the tightly-packed cluster of people standing between him and the doors, apologising half-heartedly to three people in the hope that the foot he’d just trodden on belonged to one of them on his way past. The air on the platform was not appreciably better than that on the train, but as he approached the escalators there was a promise of something closer to fresh air and he picked up his pace as much as too many people in too cramped a space would allow. Riding up to street level, Greg absently noted the posters on the wall without paying them any mind, until an advertisement for a Schumann concerto caught his eye; not that he and Sherlock were anything like conventional, but in recent weeks some of their time together had had a suspiciously date-like quality to it, and he thought the younger man might enjoy a night of music.

Outside, the weather had gone from bad to worse, and Greg flipped his collar and bowed his head in a futile effort to protect himself from the freezing rain. The Beekeeper was local to neither him nor Sherlock, but it was off the beaten path enough that it tended to escape the worst of the tourist crowds, and the beer they served was some of the best in London. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the landlord owed Sherlock for deducing that his wife was a Russian sleeper agent using him for cover as she diligently worked on a plot to assassinate the Prince of Wales. The good favour that had won him meant that it was one of the very few pubs in the capital where they could go for a drink and Greg didn’t have to intervene when someone inevitably tried to deck Sherlock.

By the time he arrived, Greg was chilled to the bone and doing his damnedest not to shiver, but something warmed inside when he spotted a scowling Sherlock tucked away in the far corner, tapping furiously at his phone. Removing his coat and taking the second chair with a relieved sigh, Greg asked, “Who’s pissed you off, then?”

“Mycroft,” came the response, with added bite. “He’s refusing to let me interview one of his spies, and he has information essential to the Keeler case. Why he insists on protecting the establishment I have no idea. He likes them no more than they like him, which is to say not at all.”

Taking a sip of whatever beer Sherlock had chosen for him to try this time, Greg smiled when it hit the spot. “It’s called being professional, Sherlock. He can’t let you run amok _every_ time you’ve got a bee in your bonnet.”

“Pfft,” came the intelligent reply, Sherlock’s attention almost entirely still on his phone. “What’s the point of my brother being the most powerful man in the country if I can’t get access to a spy? He isn’t even a good one; two direction générale de la sécurité extérieure agents followed him to the theatre last night, and he was totally oblivious.”

“So, you spent last night following a spy who was being tailed by spies? Sounds like fun.”

Sherlock glanced up from his phone, a distracting smirk lurking about his full lips. “Yes. And you spent the night watching Gogglebox and putting off your ironing.”

“Yep.” Greg put his pint down and settled back into his chair, letting his eyes wander around the pub. The Beekeeper was what he thought of as a ‘proper’ pub, with wood panelled walls and tatty beermats and leaky taps in the toilets. The screen on the far side of the bar was big enough that he could easily watch Arsenal giving Chelsea a kicking from their corner, which was just as well, really, because Sherlock was still engrossed in whatever his phone was telling him. The comfortable silence over their table lasted until Hazard tackled Koscielny, when Greg suddenly exploded, “Where’s the fucking ref?” at the same time as several other men dotted around the room.

“Thinking about his mistress. And his gambling debts, but primarily the mistress,” Sherlock replied, the commotion apparently enough to draw him away from his phone.

“How can you _possibly_ — no, don’t answer that.”

The smirk Sherlock was wearing lit something inside Greg, and when he felt the younger man’s thigh press against his own under the table, that something burned brighter. “It’s fascinating to watch you watching football.”

Feeling his face heat slightly, Greg took another swallow of beer and turned back to the screen. “You were stalking your spy on your phone.”

The pressure against his thigh increased, and Greg _felt_ the weight of Sherlock’s gaze on him. “No, I wasn’t.”

The ambient noise of the pub seemed to fade into the background as Greg’s attention shifted. “Oh?”

“No; I’ve been watching you since Walcott scored,” Sherlock clarified, and there was a definite glint in his eye. “As ridiculous as the cliché is, you come alive when your team is winning. I enjoy seeing it.”

Even a couple of months ago, Greg would have disregarded such a comment as Sherlock being After Something, but since he’d been clean of the drugs there had been a genuine effort on the part of the other man to develop their relationship, so he took it at face value. “Yeah, well, look your fill while you can; they’ve been shit for most of the season,” he replied, finishing his pint. “I can catch up with this any time, if you want to go somewhere else.”

“I wouldn’t have told you to meet me here if I wanted to be elsewhere, Greg. I will have another of those, though.” Sherlock nodded at his empty bottle, and then, in a move that was a _very_ new addition to their relationship, closed the space between them and pressed his lips to Greg’s in a brief, public kiss.

Ignoring the nasty look from the bloke wearing last season’s Chelsea strip two tables over, Greg made his way to the bar, not even attempting to rein in his smile. Initially, they had decided to keep their relationship purely platonic – the declaration of love from Sherlock aside – until things had settled somewhat, but that determination had lasted all of three weeks. Greg’s sex drive had been as low as his mood when he’d seen his GP, but with the break from work and treatment for his depression taking effect, that had slowly begun to change. Throw in him and Sherlock spending more and more time together, and he hadn’t been at all surprised when a quiet night in with a takeaway and bad telly had ended with him sprawled on his sofa as the younger man sucked him dry. Sherlock still went home most nights, but his departures were no longer immediately post-coital or without a goodnight kiss. Not that Greg thought himself terribly romantic – nor to be an eighteen year old girl, for that matter – but he was definitely enjoying the trappings of dating Sherlock. God help him if he pointed out to the other man that they were indeed dating, but the idea of it warmed him in a way that he was determinedly _not_ thinking about. He only wished that Maggie was around to see the change; she’d been telling him to deal with the situation with Sherlock since he’d caved and told her about their decidedly non-professional relations, and he knew that she would have been pleased with the direction of travel.

A hand waving in his face and a snapped, “Oi, mate!” pulled Greg out of the reverie he hadn’t realised that he’d fallen into, and he smiled apologetically at the rather harried-looking young man behind the bar. “There’s a match on and I’ve got a pub full of thirsty blokes, so make your mind up, would you?”

“Yeah, sorry. A Worm Catcher and –,” Greg came to a halt when he realised that he didn’t actually know what he’d been drinking. “Ah, any idea what that is?” He held up his glass in the hope that the beleaguered barman would be able to identify the beer from the dregs.

“You’re with Sherlock, yeah?” Greg nodded. “It’s that,” the barman said, pointing at a Hobgoblin pump.

“Right, well a pint of that and a bottle of Worm Catcher, please. Oh, and two bowls of chips.”

The drinks were on the bar and paid for in short order, and Greg wended his way back through the tightly-packed tables, doing his best not spill anything on the football crowd lest he start a riot.

“You had a positive appointment,” Sherlock declared once Greg had retaken his seat, reaching for his bottle.

“I did, yeah. I think we’re getting somewhere; I’m not coming out wanting to punch the wall anymore, anyway.”

“Good. She came very highly recommended.”

Narrowing his eyes across the table, Greg swallowed his mouthful and pinned Sherlock with A Look. “Know many therapists working for the NHS, do you?”

The innocent smile directed at him shouldn’t have worked, but it did. “Do you honestly think that my brother or I would have let you wait in excess of eight weeks for help that you needed immediately? We knew that you wouldn’t let us arrange for you to be seen in a private clinic, so we sent the private clinician to you.” Sherlock absently waved his bottle at Greg. “By our third day at the facility in Switzerland, Mycroft and I had worked our way through two psychiatrists and four therapists. Dr Majidi was the only one who could handle either of us, so it was a simple matter of contacting him for a recommendation.”

Suspecting that the brothers had pulled strings to get him seen so quickly and _knowing_ that they had were two entirely different things, but Greg couldn’t find it in himself to be angry. He _had_ needed help, and he didn’t particularly want to think about how much harder it would have been to engage with the therapy had he not been seen for months. In fact, he knew that it was entirely likely that he would have talked himself out of it, or decided that he didn’t need it once Maggie’s loss was less raw. He studied the pattern of residue left on the glass by his beer intently. “Thank you,” he replied, voice rough, and lifted his eyes to Sherlock’s. 

“You’re important to me, Greg. To both of us, obviously, but you won’t like the consequences if you do this with my brother,” Sherlock said, a small smile curving his lips as he stroked Greg’s thigh.

That startled a laugh out of Greg, and he worked his free hand under the table to grasp Sherlock’s. “No worries on that score,” he reassured, eyes falling to the other man’s lips. He’d never really been one for public displays of affection, but in that moment resisting kissing Sherlock was futile, so he didn’t even try.

Sherlock responded ardently, using Greg’s thigh to brace his weight as he leant closer; Greg twined their fingers as their tongues met, and melted into the kiss. How long it lasted he didn’t know or particularly care, but it came to what he felt to be a premature end when a throat was pointedly cleared to his right. Reluctantly, he pulled away from Sherlock and looked up to find a young woman wearing an amused smile and bearing two bowls of chips. “Keep that up much longer and these’ll get cold.”

“Thanks,” Greg said, shifting to sit properly in his seat, not having realised just how close they’d got. The bowls were swiftly deposited, and the woman and her smile disappeared back between the tables in the direction of the kitchen.

The smirk Sherlock was wearing said that he knew _exactly_ how close he had come to having a lapful. Greg watched as he liberally salted his chips, long fingers curled elegantly around the cellar. “Yes, I would like to go to the Schumann concerto.”

Dosing his own chips with a healthy sprinkling of vinegar, Greg shook his head fondly. He’d known Sherlock for over ten years, and he was _still_ regularly surprised when he knew things that he had absolutely no business knowing. “I’ll get those tickets I half thought about buying, then.”

“You make an _excellent_ boyfriend,” Sherlock replied, smiling around a hot chip.

Heart in his mouth, Greg turned his attention from searching out the chunkiest of his own chips. Their relationship was markedly different from anything it had been in the past, but he’d been wary about pressing Sherlock for any kind of definition for fear of the answer. Such a statement, however, made it impossible not to ask, “Is that what I am?”

“Unless you have a preference for something else, but I refuse to use flame, squeeze, or fancy man,” Sherlock said, tone positively dripping with disdain.

Greg reached across the space between them and thumbed Sherlock’s cheekbone, something appallingly giddy fluttering in his chest. “Are you _sure_ about this, Sherlock? You’ve never shown _any _interest in this stuff before, and I don’t want you getting into something you don’t—”__

__“—When have you ever known me to do something that I don’t want to?” Sherlock fished out a crispy chip and bit into it decisively. “John lost Mary because of my stupidity; I won’t lose you for the same reason.”_ _

__Poking through his chips for the most succulent looking ones served as a semi-decent cover as he let that percolate. “Right. So, yeah. I’m fifty fucking three and I’ve got a _boyfriend_ ,” replied Greg, trying and completely failing to fight a smile._ _

__Sherlock hummed and reached across to snag a crispy chip from Greg’s bowl with a heated look from under his eyelashes. “We can celebrate you acknowledging the obvious when we get back to your flat.”_ _

__A pulse of arousal thrummed through Greg and he shifted in his seat. Sherlock’s thigh pressed more firmly against his own and Greg pressed back, relishing in every millimetre of contact. “A celebration, eh? Any suggestions for how we do that?”_ _

__Eyes intent, Sherlock held Greg’s gaze. “Hmm, yes; I have a list.”_ _


End file.
